Looks like the falling price of oil is getting better and better results.
The same tumbling oil prices that led OPEC to slash output last week threaten to send Venezuela’s economy into a tailspin, and put an end to President Hugo Chavez’s ambitions to expand his socialist revolution at home and abroad.
To cope with plummeting oil revenue, the source of half the government’s spending, Chavez may have to cut domestic handouts and foreign aid. The first items likely to go will be arms purchases from Russia, oil subsidies for Cuba, and job-creating local projects such as bridges and subways, economists say.
“You have a country with an oil boom, that doesn’t know how to save, doesn’t know how to set up productive industries that generate jobs, and goes into debt,” said Elsa Cardozo, a professor of political science and international relations at the Universidad Central de Venezuela. “Then oil prices fall and the party ends.”
Venezuela may be poised to repeat the economic collapse it suffered in the 1980s at the end of its last oil boom. Former President Carlos Andres Perez, employing policies similar to Chavez’s, lavished petrodollars on public works projects, foreign aid and nationalizations in the late 1970s, setting the stage for a 1983 currency devaluation and spending cuts that sent millions of Venezuelans into poverty.
Not the poverty of Venezuelans part. I feel bad for the ordinary schlub who bought into Hugo’s twaddle. But I won’t be sorry to see the bastard go. Him, and his newfound Iranian and Hezbollah buddies. Buh-bye, billions in anti-Israel aid! Buh-bye, state-sanctioned raids on Jewish centers!
Update: Ended the day below $62 a barrel. Good times!
The schlub who voted for Hugo will be getting what he asked for. He elected a guy who was known to be a radical and who had already made attempts to overthrow the government and Constitution of the country. The Venezuelan majority voted him in because he promised them he’d rob “the rich” to give them bribes. (Come to think of it, Obama is making the same promise). Socialism always causes poverty, and the more socialism you have, the worse the poverty. People who voted for such a man to be President will be getting what they deserve when the economy turns even more sour and they end up impoverished. It’s Hugo’s opponents who will be, or should be, the ones we have sympathy for. They tried to prevent the disaster and got squashed and villified for their pains.
If the Venezuelans were halfway intelligent they’d put such people into office and throw Hugo and his consiglieri into prison. I suspect a good case against him for corruption could be made. But Hugo probably already has enough power to prevent any recurrence of democracy in Venezuela, so the schlubs will get fascist/commie oppression in addition to poverty for their support of Hugo. Not schlubs, schmucks.
Meryl,
The only place I’ve ever seen ‘twaddle’ used was “A Study in Scarlett”.
And Michael;Some of these people are very poorly educated and being given money to support Chavez.I would be more inclined to forgive them than tyhe US sympathizers who love any anti American dictator
So they sold their votes for the bribe of a pittance? I’m hardly likely to have any sympathy for them in that case. They must have known about Hugo’s coup attempts, at the least. They failed to use the simplest foresight and allowed themselves to be bribed for a paltry sum of money. For that they have plunged their country and themselves into deep excrementum tauri. As I said, my sympathy goes to the people who tried to stop Chavez and whose loyalty to Venezuela and its Constitution was betrayed by the venal Chavistas.
Poorly educated? It’s the most highly educated people who continually fall for the same odious slogans of socialism and empower fascist/communist tyrants to gain it. This is not a new thing. The attraction of Communism for the highly educated is well known. Less well known, but equally true, was the attraction of Nazism and Fascism for the highly educated. Avant-garde artists were on the cutting edge of Fascism (eg Marinetti). Lots of highly educated people admired Musso and what he was doing, people like H. G. Wells. And the Nazis have been described as having conquered the universities even before they conquered Germany. In Britain it was the less educated trade unionists who resisted Communism while the intellectuals of the Labour Party, like Aneurin Bevin, swooned over it. Highly educated vs poorly educated doesn’t explain it. Stupidity (highly educated does not exempt from stupidity), envy, and venality (thinking you can get rich by the government stealing from somebody else and giving you the money) do. For people who allow these vices to govern their political judgement I have no sympathy. There is a reason that envy is one of the seven mortal sins in Catholic theology.
A people who cannot control its passions and vices is unfit to rule itself. We too may be about to find out just how unfit we are, having lost the virtues the Founders believed were necessary for a free people.